Sharing a paddock with the past, sheep meet a model of a diprotodon, one of
many Australian species that became extinct after humans arrived perhaps
60,000 years ago. Geologic activity is limited mostly to erosion, which carved
this Lost City (right) and has leached nutrients from the continent's soil.
Adelaide. He looked youthfully urbane, out of
character with his reputation as an adventurer
who has wrestled pythons in New Guinea.
"Ayers Rock would have been recognized
by dinosaurs," he went on, referring to the
landmark red sandstone monolith that draws
tourists to the continent's center. "Australia is
about as old as any piece of continental crust
gets. It's not like North America, where every
ice age remade the face of
the continent."
As it drifted north
When Abori
from Antarctica, Australia
Australia w
was like a geologic ghost
byag
ship, abandoned by its
megafaun
crew. On other conti
nents mountains were
diprotodon
built, then washed away.
the size
Volcanic outbursts filled
valleys with lava or fertile
ash. Rivers carved great ditches like the Grand
Canyon, which is only six million years old. But
Australia just gradually aged.
Because of this coma, Flannery and many
other scientists say, millennia of rain leached
nutrients out of soils, salt from sea breezes
built up in the ground, and other salts blew
across the land from dry lakes in the interior.
"Because of that the Australian continent is
extremely infertile," Flannery said. "And it's
very delicate."
"It's not surprising that the farmers had real
trouble when they first came here," said Neville
Nicholls. "They came with all their baggage
mainly from England-about what the climate
was like. They recognized that it was hot and
windy and dusty,
gines arrived,
as populated
roup of
Isuch as the
-a wombat
of a rhino.
but they took quite a long
time to recognize how big
the droughts were and
how big the floods were."
Nicholls is a slender,
wry doctor of meteorol
ogy in Melbourne, who
looks both amused and
sympathetic about histo
ry's goof-ups. Compared
with Tim Flannery, he
is not an adventurer. "I
don't go to 'interesting' places," he said with
a smile. Apparently, his study of climate is
scary enough.
Nicholls is one of the pioneers in the study
of the global climate phenomenon called
ENSO-the El Nifo/Southern Oscillation.*
*See "El Nino/La Nina," by Curt Suplee, NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC, March 1999.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JULY 2000